A Call For Ludopedagogical Suggestions

Next week, as a way of ending my Existentialism in Pop Culture course with a bang, I'm going to have my students play a few games with existential themes. As I see it, the major advantage to using games is that they allow students choice which - as will become evident when I finally get around to expounding upon the meaning of "post-emo-existentiell gaming", is probably the most central tenant of existential thought. For this to work each student has to be able to play the game for herself the first time through. This rules out any sort of class play through and means it will have to be done in a campus computer lab. Thus I am constrained to games that can be played within a browser or that require minimal hardware requirements (read: essentially none) so they can be installed on aging computers (think Windows 98).

Fortunately the games that I find best express the central themes we're covering are small indie affairs anyhow. I'd like to do 5 or 6 short games. Thus far I plan to do Passage, Execution, possibly The Marriage, and finishing it all with You Have to Burn the Rope. I'll write about my reasons for choosing these games and the themes they explore after I determine their success/failure within the course as a whole (I've only ever done Passage in a course before and even then it wasn't an ideal -individual - experience). I implore you, Inconstant Reader, to give me any suggestions you can for other games (or game-like experiences) to do. Keep in my the technological constraints and preferably they should be games that can be played in less than 10 minutes.